My Earliest Memory
By
Margaret Gregory © 2012
Copyright 2014 by Margaret Gregory
All Rights Reserved
This book is a work of fiction and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events or locales is purely coincidental. The characters are productions of the author’s imagination and used fictitiously.
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Please note that I use Australian spelling throughout. You will see ou’s (colour) and ‘ise’ not ‘ize’ (realise) as well as a few other differences from American spelling.
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My Earliest Memory
My earliest memory was of a dream. It had to be.
It showed me a place and people who were utterly fantastical.
I keep having that dream, over and over. Not every night, because usually I am so tired that I hardly have the energy to change into my sleeping gown.
I first had the dream when I, a nameless orphan boy, had just come to live with Chrissie, Skyeport’s midwife and healer. To soothe my loneliness, she had let me sleep next to her. In that dream, I found myself surrounded by people in colourful glittering clothes and I was happy. In the background of those dreams were men with metallic faces, their cheeks and nose covered but their eyes showed, glittering in the bright lights. Only the different colours of the hair around their mouths distinguished them one from the other.
In that dream, I felt loved – safe. Not that Chrissie doesn’t love me as if I were her own son. It is just, that in my dream – the feeling is different.
When I have this dream, I seem to hear music – soft, gentle melodic music – unlike anything I have ever heard in my life.
Once, only once, I went into Skyeport town. That once, I thought I heard some music like in my dream…
“Speed bonnie boat, like a bird on the wind…”
I slipped away from Chrissie, wanting to hear the words. I had heard only that one measure when a huge man picked me up. I struggled but he held me firmly, and I could not call out, for his hand was over my mouth.
“Fool, boy! You do not want to be caught listening to that! Go home. Now, quickly, before the soldiers find you listening and remove your ears.”
My foster-mother, took me home. She wasn’t angry. She just told me that I should never run off like that again. For the Emperor’s guards might have hurt me.
“For listening to that song?” I had asked. “But it was lovely…”
“Yes,” Chrissie had agreed. “But those who sing it hate the Emperor – and the song angers him. Don’t try to find the singers, Tommi. Promise me.”
I nodded, and kept that promise in my mind, along with the secret that my name wasn’t Tommi and I wasn’t named after the Emperor Tomasek. My true name was Owain, and I was named for the old King.
All the minstrels that have ever come through Skyeport only seem to play the accordion, or the pipes. They play music for the foot stomping dances the men indulge in during festivals and weddings, or they play music for the bawdy songs sung by drunken men at the Skyeport Inn.
Chrissie told me I was much too young to understand those songs. Yet my friends and I often sat outside the inn – to listen. I hoped to hear music like in my dream.
There, outside the inn, we smell the beer, the baking, the pork and cabbage meals, the horses, the hay, all smells that are much nicer than the wet earth, the horse dung and sweat of our daily toil.
However, for all these familiar smells, I sometimes think that in my dreams, there are others.
Perhaps my dreams are why I find myself drawn to Lily – the innkeeper’s maid. I have seen her dressed in colourful dresses, with glittering decorations on her revealed flesh. I’ve smelt a scent, like flowers, about her. At other times though, she smells of something musky and unpleasant. But mostly, she reminds me of my dream. She is the closest thing to it in the whole of the east coast marshlands – perhaps on the whole of the island of Skye.
Lily often visits Chrissie. When they have finished talking privately, they often share a cup of herbal tea, and I am allowed to join them. On some of these occasions, I see where Chrissie had treated cuts and bruises. Other times, though she tried to hide it, I knew Lily was moving more carefully than normal. It reminded me of when I had twisted my leg. Sometimes, Lily left taking little packets of crushed herbs.
When I saw Lily out and about, she rarely noticed me, or even smiled. Sometimes though, when I smiled at her over a cup of tea, she would smile tentatively back. I wanted to keep making her smile. I decided then that when I was old enough, I would get the town marshal to marry us.
Once I said so, but though Lily smiled, it was a sad smile. She told me that she was much too old for me - but I knew she wasn’t that much older than I was.
That was five years ago, when I was ten. Chrissie told me that I was so special to care about Lily, and told me that what Lily needed most were friends. Ones who did not expect anything of her, and who wanted nothing of her. So that was what I tried to be – ever since that time.
Chrissie never told me what Lily was. I was surprised when one of the town’s older boys boasted that he had taken her. In my innocence, I asked where they had gone.
“I’ll show you,” he had offered, and he led me into the forest and into view of an open glade.
I had seen animals mating, knew the reason for it, and thought little of it. But seeing…
I ran all the way back to Chrissie and told her what I had seen Darry the axe-man doing to Lily. I wanted to go and tell the town marshal, but she grabbed me and held me until I agreed to listen.
Tears streamed down my face. It seemed that there was nothing I, a boy of fifteen, could do to change the way of things. How could I, alone, depose so many hard and arrogant men?
Life was hard, Chrissie explained. Life wasn’t fair…
“Why don’t people do something about such things? Why don’t mean and horrible overlords not get replaced?” I demanded to know.
“One day…” Chrissie had said then. “One day…maybe someone can.”
She was looking at me and in that moment, I saw her. Not as the worn out old midwife, dressed in dingy grey and brown mended rags, with her hands and face smeared with dirt from her herb garden…Not with her gingery hair lank with sweat after a long session of healing, or a difficult birth.
I saw her as if she was one of the glittering, colourful women in my dream - strong, not tall, with deep auburn hair, and receiving the attention due to a queen.
“I am not a queen,” Chrissie said, as if she had read my thoughts. “There hasn’t been a queen for over thirty years. She died when the Castle men were killed or forced into exile by the invading barbarians.”
“What happened to the King?” I asked. “Why didn’t he stop the barbarians taking over the islands?”
An odd look came over Chrissie’s face. “He was captured, imprisoned. Three of his sons were taken too, and their wives and the Prince Regent’s children.”
I felt some of the horror.
“The wives were given to his soldiers; the children made slaves and had to help build the new fortifications. The little girl was only three, and the boys were five and seven. The king and his sons were kept in separate places. If any of them tried to escape all the others were punished as well – beaten or whipped, and kept on starvatio
n rations.”
I felt tears forming in my eyes from the extreme sadness in Chrissie’s voice.
Chrissie had never beaten me, or hit me, but the overseer in the fields punished any sign of shirking. I had felt his leather strap a time or more. Once, though, when I had wasted my food, Chrissie had given me nothing but thin gruel to eat for a whole week… so I knew what she meant.
Since then, I had never rebelled against her strict expectations. I had come to see that she was trying, in her limited way, to make things better.
“And so there is no one to fight against this barbarian Emperor?” I asked.
The Emperor was a faceless creature, and the reason why we were worked so hard. We had to send half of our crops and produce to his castle, and most people barely subsisted on the rest.
Then Chrissie did something totally unexpected. She began to sing – in a surprisingly clear and young sounding voice.
“Speed bonnie boat like a bird on the wing
Onward the sailors cry.
Carry the lad that's born to be king
Over the sea to Skye.”
As she sang, I seemed to be having a daydream. Vivid, with the smells of the sea, damp spray being flung into my face, wind so strong that it almost plucked me from the arms of the soldier carrying me. Waves crashing over rocks, thunder rending the air, and the unsteady motion of the small boat, as it was almost smashed against the wooden jetty.
“Loud the wind howls
loud the waves roar
Thunderclaps rend the air
Baffled our foes
stand on the shore
Follow they will not dare
Burned are their homes, exile and death
Scatter the loyal men;
Yet ere the sword cool in the sheath
Charlie will come again.”
On the shore, receding from sight amongst the sea spray – angry men, thwarted men, wearing pot-like helms like those of the town marshal’s men. In the boat, with me…was it me?…faceless men in the metal helms, like in my dream.
I closed my eyes, and felt once again to be a very small child. I felt arms hugging me, tears falling onto my hair. I saw the face of a tall, auburn haired man, who might have been a male twin to Chrissie.
And I remembered words I had overheard when I had been woken from a deep sleep. “You have my promise, my liege. No harm will befall him.”
Then a gruff voice, full of emotion, “That had better be true, Tymos. If I fail this day, he is the only hope for the realm. He is the last of the Regis line.”
When the vision faded, I realised that Chrissie had an arm around me. I had the strangest idea that the daydream vision had come from her. Had my other dream also come from her?
Did I, an orphan whose parents weren’t known, belong in that dream?
Again, Chrissie seemed to read my mind.
“Yes. You are Owain Charles Tymothy Regis.”
More memories returned to me and I added these to my daydream vision.
“My mother?” I asked.
“She took a chill on the voyage, and never recovered,” Chrissie spoke with deep sadness.
“My father…” I asked, not wanting to know, but needing to.
“He died, but not until after he weakened the Emperor’s forces,” Chrissie told me, stating a fact with pride mixed with sadness.
“How can I succeed when he failed?”
“You won’t be alone,” Chrissie promised.
“I know nothing of fighting, or of leading people. No one heeds me…”
I felt an almost overwhelming fear – not a fear of taking my place or of the trials of trying to change things – but fear of what would happen if I failed.
“You won’t be alone,” Chrissie repeated. “And I have taught you more than you realise.”
My mind filled with memories of the odd dances she had taught me when I was very young, and how she had encouraged me to scurry and climb everywhere. When I became stuck, she had encouraged me to think of ways to help myself. Then I thought of how she had never tired of answering my questions, taught me healing, and how a body was meant to work. And I could read and write – an affectation that none of my friends saw a reason for.
Chrissie had a few books, kept carefully hidden. History books and others. I had read slowly through them all, and asked questions until I understood them. Only now, I realised the sense of them.
I pushed myself free of Chrissie, and asked, “Why now? Why am I seeing this now?”
“Because now you see the world as it is. Now you understand that it must change,” she told me, and added, cryptically, “It is time for the circle to close.”
I waited, feeling there was more she was going to say.
“The Emperor is dying. His only son…my son…has lived an indulged and pampered life for far too long. He is arrogant, and over confident – because no one dares win against him. He, like his father, is a mean and evil man. Now, is the time for change.”
Once again, I seemed to see Chrissie dressed in a colourful bejewelled gown.
“The Queen didn’t die,” I said, filled with awe.
One day I hoped to understand that odd smile she gave me – a mixture of sadness, determination and agelessness.
“No,” was all she said.
The end
For information -
Lyrics from the Celtic folk song - “Skye boat song.”
This song commemorates the escape of Bonnie Prince Charlie -when Flora MacDonald took him, disguised as a serving maid, from Uist to Skye in a small boat
The Tymorean Trust Series:
Book 1 - Power Rising
Book 2 - Great Ones
Coming Soon
Book 3 - The Return to Earth
Atapi Sorceress Series:
The Wild One
Coming Soon:
Atapi Sorceress
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